Once again, we want to thank everyone who attended and helped publicize the last two reading group meeting, which were truly engaging and inspiring! The CLIFF Organizing Committee will be holding the third and final pre-conference reading group meeting on Monday, February 23rd from 4:00-6:00pm. The meeting will take place in the Comparative Literature Department Library (2015 Tisch Hall). We will have food and refreshments for all participants.

Once again, we are extremely grateful and excited that our keynote speaker, Professor Susan Buck-Morss, will be joining us via video conference. This final meeting will be focused on questions of resistance, epistemology, and “universality,” and we will take our lead from one of Professor Buck-Morss’s most acclaimed works. Here is a list of all the assigned readings that we will discuss during our next meeting:

Susan Buck-Morss – Hegel, Haiti, & Universal History. We strongly encourage all participants to read this book in its entirety; however, the required pages that we will be discussing are as follows: pages 3-23, 48-60, 74-86 107-151

Lastly, for those who have time, we encourage you to read Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (Belknap edition). This is not among the required readings for our third meeting, but we would very much like to discuss Professor Buck-Morss’s famous methodological inheritance and reworking of Benjaminian concepts and, especially, how we can utilize, extend, or challenge her approaches in our own work.

As we move closer to the conference dates (March 13-14), this reading group has been a wonderful resource for all of us to address key questions/concerns about the state of “the Left,” the political nature/ventures of our own work, the conditions of academia that constitute and limit our own political strivings, etc. We have all been eagerly anticipating a discussion of Hegel, Haiti, & Universal History, and we hope that this final meeting will provide a platform for us to address residual (“leftover”) concerns but also to chart a direction for future studies, teaching, political activities, etc.

NOTE: IF YOU PLAN TO ATTEND OUR READING GROUP MEETING, PLEASE EMAIL US AT leftoversumich@gmail.com TO LET US KNOW THAT YOU WILL BE ATTENDING. This will help us make adjustments for space, catering, seating, etc.